How do you make a film about a subject as expansive
and many-tentacled as the drug war? Do you focus on its circuitous history? The
injustices of sentencing? The destructive effects on families and communities?
The profit motives that fuel the system? The impact on policing, law
enforcement and public safety? The ways in which entrenched racism and classism
dictate the system’s targets? The answer for filmmaker Eugene Jarecki was a
whopping “all of the above.” In the stunning “The House I Live In,” he depicts
the vast sweep of this insidious campaign’s effects, while portraying the
nuanced – often conflicted – views of the political and economic players who
perpetuate it. The film delivers a multi-dimensional picture of an issue of
which we’re usually able to view only slices, demonstrating, in sum, the
colossal failure of the 40-year “war on drugs.” I got on the phone with Jarecki
to discuss the film, and how he is using it as a tool to spark tangible action.
1.
Schenwar: “The House I Live In” covers such a
massive and complex topic, and you captured that complexity while showing that
there is a very clear verdict as to whether or not the war on drugs has worked.
Sometimes when progressives talk about these issues, the evils of the system
seem to get personified in this way that’s not helpful (the police are “evil,”
a particular judge or politician is “evil,” etc.). But you interviewed police,
prison guards, judges - all those folks - and you didn’t hear the things we
might expect to hear from them. So, I’m wondering, how did you decide who to
interview, and what was that process of decision-making like?
2.
Jarecki: I wanted to portray the fullness
of the issue. As the drug war has grown over time, it’s like any predatory
monster; it knows no bounds. I was convinced from early on we needed to travel
far and wide and talk to people at all levels of the drug war, from the dealer
and the user to family members to community members to cops, jailers, judges,
lawyers, wardens and then - ultimately - to policymakers. I wanted to see how
people inside the system felt, far more than I wanted to hear from critics.
There are critical voices in the film, people like David Simon and Richard
Miller and Charles Ogletree and Michelle Alexander - very smart critics who put
what the viewer sees in the larger political and historical context - but what
mattered most to us was the firsthand experience and testimony of the people
whose stories are wrapped up in this issue. People surprised us greatly. You go
into the prison system and you think, well, the people who run Corrections,
they’ll be the real “tough on crime” people, and they’ll explain to me how they
see the world, which will stand in great opposition to the way a drug dealer I
just spoke to sees the world. But we found out how many people on the inside,
up and down the chain of command, viewed the system deeply critically. That was
unexpected, and that became the most inspiring part of making the film. Almost
no one believes in this system. In looking for diversity - crossing the country
and encountering so many different walks of life and so many geographies - I
ended up finding an extraordinary unanimity: the idea that the drug war has
been with us for 40 years, we’ve spent a trillion dollars on it, we’ve had 45
million drug arrests, and we have nothing to show for it. So, it was almost
impossible to find someone who would defend a record like that.
3.
MS: Wow. Did you meet anyone who did
wholeheartedly defend it?
4.
EJ: No. The only people who come close to
wholehearted defense - and it’s halfhearted defense in their case, honestly -
are the people on the profiteering side of the war on drugs, whose livelihood
depends on it. So, as in so many professions that have a dark subtext, they’ve
developed a sort of Orwellian doubletalk, to euphemize and obfuscate about what
they do. They have all kinds of prepared argumentation about the benefits of
the way in which they profit from it, the services they provide. Their phone
services are better, or they sell a better stun gun than the other stun gun, or
their restraint chair is better than the old kind of restraint chair that
another company made. At the micro level, they may all have something to say
about how they’re making a better good or service at a better value, but it is
within what even they would recognize is not the best way to make a living - it’s
probably not the career they dreamed of when they were in high school. Now
certainly, all across the country, you’ll find that there are people who
believe that the legal system should be uncompromising when it comes to the
violent and the super-violent. But we’re talking about incarceration on a mass
scale of the nonviolent - people who do not pose a threat to you or me; they
pose a threat mostly to themselves. Who would defend sentences for the
nonviolent that are often longer than sentences for the violent? That anomaly
in the American legal system doesn’t have a lot of advocates - certainly not
the judges who, half the time, are forced to give sentences they feel are
inappropriate. The mandatory minimum laws that set minimum penalties [for drug
offenses and certain other crimes] are so far-reaching in America that the
judges find their options incredibly limited. One judge said to me, “The kid
standing before me on a crack cocaine charge with a previous offense, also
nonviolent, is facing 20-year mandatory minimum for five grams. If he had won
the medal of honor or pulled his grandmother out of a burning building
yesterday, I couldn’t take that into account in his sentencing.” Across the country,
we found this almost unanimous chorus of voices agreeing that this system doesn’t
make any sense. It is a victim of the same corruption of politics that’s
ruining so many walks of life in America: corporate America and Congress are in
an unholy alliance with each other, in which Congress members ensure their
electability by servicing their corporate patrons, who then bring jobs to their
districts and money to their campaign coffers. That unholy alliance is behind
the military industrial complex, it’s behind the pharmaceutical industry, it’s
why we have the insurance corruption we have, it’s behind the banks, it’s why
the polluters get away with murder. The prison-industrial complex is just,
perhaps, the most obscene example of that phenomenon that has taken over every
walk of American life.
5.
MS: So, even if we believe that these
policies need to change, and even if the majority of the country believes it -
if corporate interests are calling the shots, it seems so tough to cut through
those profit motives. From your experience working on the film, can you
describe the possibilities you see for breaking out of that cycle of
profit-driven mass incarceration?
6.
EJ: Revolutions happen in societies. They
even happen when there are industries and deeply entrenched interests that have
come to rely on the status quo. Believe me, there were vast economic
dependencies built into slavery. I believe that, ultimately, the reason the
prison industrial complex is vulnerable is that with both its record of failure
and its level of expenditure, it’s harder and harder to defend at a time when
country is so economically challenged. At a time like this, a gigantic,
wasteful program like our system of mass incarceration is suddenly susceptible
to attack not only from those who think it’s morally bankrupting, but also
those who see it is economically bankrupting. This isn’t an actual business
that makes a product that you can sell to somebody, or that other countries can
buy. You can’t sell the misery of a prisoner. You can’t sell his destroyed
family, his orphaned children, his shattered community. In fact, this “product”
weakens us in the world because it erodes America’s workforce. Imagine all the
people wasting away in jail right now who are simply drug-addicted people... How
many of our famous geniuses were [drug users], from Thomas Edison to Steve
Jobs? Who knows who’s wasting away in a prison cell right now that could have
made the next big thing that would help America’s economy? There’s nothing
productive about digging a giant hole in the ground and throwing your own
people and your own money into it. This system also represents an overexpansion
of government and a giant bureaucracy, so that those like Grover Norquist and
Pat Robertson who are against the drug war can find common ground with people
like Danny Glover and Cornel West, who see the drug war as ethically, socially
and spiritually destructive to America. How our beacon of democracy can
reconcile that identity with having become the world’s largest jailor - it’s very
difficult for a wide range of people to get their heads around it.
7.
MS: So, it seems like there are some great
alliances emerging in the activist community around the drug war and mass
incarceration. But regardless of the kinds of grassroots work being done,
incarceration and the drug war don’t make nice campaign issues, because
lawmakers “have” to talk about being tough on crime. For us, as people who want
to make a difference, what can we do to put pressure on our elected officials
and bring these issues to their attention?
8.
EJ: Well, I recommend several things
people can do. With the film, we are trying to shed light on how important it
is that people going forward hear the phrase “drug war” as a dirty word, like
slavery, or Jim Crow. First and foremost, the movie is meant to show the
wrongheadedness of this 40-year campaign, whose failure demonstrates its
misconception of the problem. So I want to make sure there’s a very clear
recognition in the public space that those days of buying into that logic are
over. For everyday people, that means they have to internalize that idea, and
become walking messengers of it - to their friends, over email, through any
organizations they belong to. That also means that when a politician comes
before us and uses the kind of “tough on crime” rhetoric that politicians used
to use to work the public into a frenzy and get them to support draconian
sentencing and law enforcement, we must boo and hiss them. It should be like
someone standing there giving you all the reasons why you should support
slavery - you would boo and hiss them until they were replaced with someone who
spoke like we do in the modern world. Instead, we need to be talking about
smart on crime legislation, which means treatment, and careful and judicious use
of the law - frankly, far more like what Richard Nixon did. Even though Nixon
launched the war on drugs, as a policymaker, he had a very interesting balance:
he spent the majority of his drug budget on treatment and the minority on law
enforcement. We do the reverse. We also want to look at other examples in the
world. Portugal has decriminalized possession across the board. They maintain
the power to incarcerate those who deal drugs, but have stopped incarcerating
those who use them - and the results have been extraordinary, by every leading
indicator: social, economic and legal. So, the goal for the public is to make
them aware of the problems with the drug war and shift their voting patterns so
they are driven by sanity on this most important issue of social justice in
American life. At the local level of effecting change, the public has a
different role. At our website,
you have the opportunity to enter your zip code and find out who’s working to
fight against the drug war in your area, and how you might fit into the effort
to change this horrible situation.... State by state across the country, there
are policies - like “three strikes” in Californiai and stop-and-frisk in New
York - that must be the focus of anyone concerned with the war on drugs, so
that the deep local underpinnings of the system begin to be shaken, while we
sink into the reform level more broadly at the top.
9.
MS: In terms of policy change: the film
points toward ending mandatory minimums, and other reforms that would
substantially decrease the incarceration of drug offenders. But I start
thinking about all the people - including some of the people interviewed in the
film - who commit crimes that aren’t explicitly drug crimes (like trafficking
or possession), but they’re still crimes that are committed in order to obtain
drugs: robbery, or burglary, or sometimes even violent crimes. These crimes are
happening because these people are caught up in the system, and often, because
they’re addicted to drugs. But since those crimes are not explicitly drug
crimes, would they also be confronted differently in the new system you’re
pointing toward?
10.
EJ: Well, in a world where you emphasize
treatment in society, you wouldn’t let go of the fact that we have,
appropriately, very tough laws for violent crimes like rape and murder. But in
our current system, by having a blurry approach to drug addiction in which you
treat addiction like a violent crime, we’re actually creating more criminals
and increasing violence. We take a nonviolent person who’s simply struggling
with their own addiction, and incarcerate them, and in prison, they learn to
become more advanced criminals; we concentrate that person’s education in more
violent criminality, in a confined space where there are few other role models.
They then come out with a strike on their record, making it nearly impossible
for them to get a job, therefore increasing the likelihood that they will get
involved in the underground economy and use their newly learned violent
tactics. Likewise, when we empower and incentivize police to rack up untold
numbers of petty drug arrests, rather than focusing their energy on more
serious crimes, we compromise public safety as well, because now we have police
on the street filling quotas and earning overtime by involving themselves with
nonviolent petty drug arrests; more serious crimes go on around them with
insufficient pursuit. If drugs were not criminalized in the way that they are,
if they were controlled as substances and people were given treatment, you
would have far less violence associated with addiction, because people would be
dealing with far less addiction. By leaving addiction untreated, we leave it
there to foster violence and criminality.
11.
MS: Going back to the way in which you’re
hoping the film will lead to a shift in public opinion: it has always
frustrated me that mainstream media tend to veer away from criminal justice in
this way - they often bypass the injustices of the system and focus on “crime”
in a vacuum. Can you talk about the ways in which you’re using the film as a
tool to build awareness and advocacy?
12.
EJ: What we’re doing with the film is
very much educated by what I’ve learned over the years through making other
films. I learned with those films that although they enjoyed the life of
high-profile documentaries, that was a limited life, because documentaries in
America are distributed with some prejudices about who the movie-going public
is. It was clear to us that some of the key audiences to whom the film would
matter the most - a lot of them live in places, whether in the inner city or in
the heartland of this country, that don’t typically have art houses that show
serious documentaries. So we knew from early on we would pursue screenings in
schools, churches, prisons and other public institutions. Some of the most
exciting screenings we’ve had have been in prisons: we were given remarkable
access to show the film in several prisons in Oklahoma. The prisoners were made
very angry by the film in one way, because it explains a lot about the
unfairnesses that have befallen them, but at the same time they felt loved - by
those of us that made the film, and even by the Department of Corrections of
Oklahoma, that was willing to respect them enough to show them the film and
bring them into this conversation. Those screenings in prisons have been deeply
inspiring. I’m also speaking in churches and schools in Chicago, Los Angeles,
New York and across the country. The goal is to bring an ever-growing
cross-section of Americans into this extremely important and sensitive
conversation, and build an ever-growing constituency that recognizes that we
need a change here. This includes people who work in the prison system and are
worried about losing their jobs. In a treatment-based system there are a ton of
jobs: it’s a huge thing to be able to deal with the most massive addiction
problem of any country on earth. Many of these [prison employees] have worked
for decades to try to help people steer clear of their addiction; they’ve just
done it in incarceration settings. I want to see us focus on treatment in a
real way, where all these people could shift into jobs in which they’re proud
of what they do. There’s nothing scary about this. We once went from buggy
whips to automobiles - and yes, it was a change, and there were growing pains,
but I don’t think anyone wishes we’d go back to buggy whips. We have new
information about the drug war now. Decades have told us that this is not the
way to do it! So we’ve got to regroup and find an inspired way of becoming the
envy of the world instead of the laughingstock - or rather, the cryingstock -
of the world.
13.
MS: I love that idea of not only taking the
film to various communities, but also taking it inside, and hopefully sparking
productive conversations among people who are directly affected. In talking to
prisoners myself, I am struck by their views on and their understanding of the
particulars of the incarceration system - they’re such an important part of
this discussion.
14.
EJ: I’ve made a rule with my team: we’re
not taking on any new film production until further notice so that we can do
best job of getting this film out at the grassroots level. We’re devoting every
ounce of energy to getting this film out so we can make some change here. I don’t
just want to be a merchant of despair; I don’t want to just sell sad stories
for a ticket price and have people buy popcorn and see how terribly we’re
treating our fellow human beings. I want to see this system get better!
Copyright, Truthout. May not be reprinted without permission.
Maya Schenwar is Truthout’s editor-in-chief and the
author of Locked Down, Locked Out: Why Prison Doesn’t Work and How We
Can Do Better. Follow her on Twitter @mayaschenwar.
Previously, she was a senior editor and reporter at
Truthout, writing on US defense policy, the criminal justice system, campaign
politics, and immigration reform. Prior to her work at Truthout, Maya was
contributing editor at Punk Planet magazine. She has also written for the Guardian,
In These Times, Ms. Magazine, AlterNet, Z Magazine, Bitch
Magazine, Common Dreams, the New Jersey Star-Ledger and others. She also
served as a publicity coordinator for Voices for Creative Nonviolence. Maya is
on the Board of Advisors at Waging Nonviolence.
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